HC upholds conviction of man who killed unwanted son

Guilt established based on the chain of circumstances which indicated the man had thrown his one-month-old baby into a well, the court said

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Thursday upheld the conviction of a man accused of killing his infant son who was born after his wife refused to abort the baby. A division bench of justices Sarang Kotwal and Shyam Chandak dismissed the appeal filed by the convict, Vilas Yelpale, a resident of Anjale village in Solapur’s Sangola Taluka, saying his guilt was established based on the chain of circumstances which indicated he had thrown the one-month-old baby into a well.

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According to the order copy uploaded on the court’s website, Vilas Yelpale, now 42, became a father for the third time when his son was born in September 2011. His marriage was already on the rocks by then due to his ill-treating his wife and his alleged extra-marital affair with another woman from the village.

Yelpale’s wife claimed that during her pregnancy, her husband and his family asked her to abort the child, which she turned down. She delivered the baby boy at her parental home in Mumbai and returned with him to her marital home in Anjale in October 2011. When she woke up the following day before dawn, the baby was missing from the cradle and her husband too was not at home.

When she ran out looking for them, Yelpale and his family members claimed that a wolf had snatched the baby and they would look for him after sunrise. Later, the baby was found floating in a neighbouring well and the police filed an accidental death report at the behest of Yelaple’s cousin.

Subsequently, Yelaple confronted his wife and asked her why she’d chosen to give birth to the child instead of undergoing abortion. “Why did you not abort? Therefore, we both threw the baby in the well when you were sleeping,” he told his wife, who took ill after the incident, and lodged a complaint with the police nearly a month later, when she recovered.

During investigation, police found the baby’s quilt on a tree near their house at the behest of Yelpale.

The court called Yelpale’s behaviour unnatural, because when he purportedly saw the baby being taken away by a wolf, he did not alert his neighbours or look for the baby and instead persuaded his wife to not cry, assuring they would search for the baby after sunrise.

The discovery of the quilt at the instance of Yelpale strongly corroborated his wife’s version about the incident, the court observed.

“There will be a corresponding burden on the inmates of the house to give cogent explanations as to how the crime was committed. The inmates of the house cannot get away by simply keeping quiet and offering no explanation on the supposed premise that the burden to establish its case lies entirely upon the prosecution,” the court observed, citing Yelpale’s extra-judicial confession to his wife as the reason for cementing the conclusion that he had murdered the baby.

“No two views are possible from the evidence on record, one of which could favour the appellant,” the court said, upholding Yelpale’s conviction by a Pandharpur court in 2019.